


GUTS: Burning Down The House

by apiphile



Series: thursdayverse [8]
Category: The Used
Genre: Backstory, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, M/M, Mob AU, author grossed herself out writing this, horrible things happen to children, pack mentality, protagonist is a psychopath, written to bribe jess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-11
Updated: 2010-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:56:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Appendix (or Guts!) to Thursdayverse. Quinn relives his backstory in a fever dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	GUTS: Burning Down The House

The fever has been passed around them like a joint, or an individual beer, and now it's his turn. At least Quinn knows what to expect from the sickness, and when the shaking begins, when he's already dressed and undressed so many hot and unhappy times that his arms ache, when his ass is red and sore from shitting out brown lemonade, he flings himself off the motel bed and onto his feet. Which also hurt.

Atlanta. So hot it's kinda hard to say what's feverish and what's just shitty Georgia summer, the weak aircon ruffling the sweaty hair on the back of his neck.

The bathroom light hums like a far off vacuum cleaner working over time and he pulls the door to behind him, not letting the latch click. Turns the shower on lukewarm and piss weak, and spirals into the plastic tray beneath like the turd he currently feels like, water plastering his stinking, sick-sweaty clothes to his clammy-ass skin.

Quinn burns.

Ten minutes or two hours later he's woken from his stupor by Bert pissing. Not pissing _on_ him, which is strange as lying down in the bathroom is pretty much an invitation to be a receptacle for the urine of anyone who happens to be passing, but just letting a stream fly echoing and golden into the toilet bowl.

"Hey Quinnery-Quinn," Bert says sleepily, brushing matted hair from his eyes with his free hand, "Whatcha doing?"

"Looking for your mom's cap, it fell out of her massive cunt," Quinn mutters, his teeth chattering. His skin feels like wet latex or uncooked sausage; it disgusts him to touch, and he's sure most of that fluid in the shower tray must be perspiration, not shower water. His back touches the tiled wall in two places and both of them make him too conscious of how tight and hot his body is.

"Cool," Bert yawns and shakes drops off. "I'm going back to bed to ride your mom some more," he says, not moving from his perch above the toilet.

"Go then. I'm going to come up your mom's asscrack and make you a butt brother," Quinn mumbles, shivering in the shallow water that's all but sizzling in contact with his feverish skin.

Bert shrugs and trails out without so much as a cursory splash at his hands. "Quinn," he says from the door, swinging on the hinges till they squeak irritatingly.

"What, fuckass?" his head his too tight for his brain and every word hurts to listen to.

"Fuckass your mom. Don't be an asshole, asshole." The words are meaningless, a catechism they've repeated so often in so many permutations that they've eroded everything but what they cover up, the real point to saying them.

"Don't be a motherfucker, motherfucker," Quinn yawns automatically, and the door closes behind Bert, the latch clicking into place. The language of this exchange might confuse the shit outta anyone else, but it leaves a warm, soft cavity in the centre of his chest.

* * *

He doesn't really remember his mom. Not her face, anyways. He remembers a swirling warm green-scented cloud of pot smoke and huge, loose-handing, soft breasts in a purple dress, and purple-painted toenails. All he remembers of his dad is a beard and a laugh, both of them enormous and booming and reeking of Mary Jane.

But the front yard is clear as the pictures on the newest TV screens, in his memory, pinprick defined, razor-sharp, every detail intact as if it has been preserved in formaldehyde.

It is green jungle, a tangle of crawling weeds knotted around each other like child's fingers, snaking and sneaking over the paved path to the porch. In the swathes of creepers and ivy and other plants he doesn't know the names of, old motorbike parts and a rusting, faded-yellow tricycle tumble into view like spilled secrets.

It's been Africa and Mexico and India. There have been lions and savages and dinosaurs and space aliens and the IRS. Who or what this is Quinn doesn't know but he tells his brother and sister all about he evil menace as they squat naked by the ant nest under the porch and poke the marching columns of red and black with car antennae.

Quinn is rangy and brown and has a chipped tooth. His world is punctuated by irregular, chocolate-based meals that leave him woozy and laughing without cease; clothes are an occasional inconvenience for walks to the store to get flour and butter and shit, and shoes figure so little in his halcyon life that he's only ever seen them in picture books.

They sleep where they want to, Quinn, Riley, and Lilth: on the couch with its burn marks and ash smears and faded flower patterns, on the porch on a bed of cushions they've dragged out and left to mildew, in their own beds, in each other's beds, in their parents' huge endless and spongy futon covered in unfinished hand-crocheted blankets. Wherever they wanted to.

The front yard is shadows and green light in the midday sun and they nap beneath the weeds like drowsy tigers, full and content, sunburnt and dreamy, mumbling chants to each other - _A B C D E, I see you copper you can't catch me_ \- _one two three, what are we fighting four_ -

Kicking each other's feet, wiping chocolatey mouths on bare forearms, waiting for the rain to fall (and in winter, rubber boots and antique scarves from the thrift shop, but he barely remembers winter, just this one final summer).

Quinn Allman is six years old and in three weeks everything will change, and the slow death of the little boy who tells his brother and sister adventure stories under the porch will begin. Pupation will begin. Something new will emerge.

* * *

It's raining in New Jersey. It's been raining on and off for three days, sullen and miserable half-sheets of water matching only in part Quinn's mood since he got fired from the chemical plant for flicking a lit cigarette at his supervisor's eyes1. It rains like the sky has a grudge against the street and the standing puddles ripple orange waves as the streetlights ping on in the too-early dusk.

Everything is bruise-dark and drunk-miserable, the buildings lean and whisper to each other about the crows, of which there are many (Quinn remembers this, but not the name of the town. He knows it was Jersey, because of the smell, that industrial fart that hangs over 90% of the state like a badge of honour: here be assholes).

It's raining, and some stupid prick has ruined Quinn's evening. He was going to get drunk to celebrate his freedom from borderline solvency; he got drunk the last two nights and Bert, who is on the brink of being asked to leave the gas station he is embezzling two sets of wages from, says three nights is traditional.

He has dropped the beer bottles on the sidewalk in the rain. They're not broken they'll fizz up like Alka-Seltzer in a whore when opened; Quinn has had his evening wrecked by some bulbous tumour of a man who has an aim as good as his own, and access to fragments of masonry.

Bert's scalp is bleeding. He holds one grotty glove over the wound, doing more harm to it than if he'd let the rain clean it out, and he's yelling at the jerk who just launched a stone the size of a golfball at his skull.

No reason. Just didn't like the look of two scrawny, scruffy, faggy-looking boys just out of their teens, and he wants to _express himself_.

Quinn doesn't remember what Bert yells at the prick, but it will have been vile. No one knows swearwords and cussing like Bert McCracken. He's eloquent in his rage, a poet of profanity, erudite and inventive and truly, truly foul. He has a mouth like a city sewer, and he's aiming it with glittering-eyed determination at the dead man walking.

Quinn remembers his face.

He remembers all their faces. Anyone who hurt him, anyone who hurt his bros, every drop of blood drawn, he remembers – their faces are like diamond etchings made with lasers. He remembers.

He launches himself down the street like a bullet in a frayed beanie hat, knocking the prick off-balance for long enough to take his work tools, his _sledgehammer_. The rain streams into his eyes, clumping eyelashes together in wet black stars, his feet already soaked through to some layer one deeper than just skin; Quinn's grip on the wooden shaft is firm in spite of this, his rough palms biting splinter-deep.

On a good day Quinn weighs maybe a hundred and twenty pounds and has biceps like knotted string, and his arms burn and shake and tremble as he swings the hammer like an extension of their natural reach.

It doesn't get high, but it gets just high enough; the crack as it crunches into the prick's kneecap is probably audible in fucking Philly.

There's no yell, not yet. Guy's tough, or thinks he's tough, and he's fucking dumb. Fucking fucking dumb. Quinn smashes his other knee with a slightly less effective swing, his shoulder already aching, and takes five quick if not nimble steps back, out of grabbing range.

"COCK_SUCKER_!" the guy hiss-yells from behind the gates of pain-clenched teeth, crashed unwillingly into kneeling on the asphalt, blood tracing red shorelines in the rain before it dissipates into pink clouds and runs away; his bulk is thrown back over his calves to save the pressure on his kneecaps, but it won't help him.

"THAT'S ME!" Bert yells back. He sounds cheerful – Quinn knows he isn't. Sometimes Bert giggles when he's furious, because he's had too many years of forced smiles for his brain to deal right with feelings; sometimes Bert giggles when he's hurt, because he still can't forget what happens if you cry. Quinn can understand that.

The guy's hands are fumbling for something - _a gun_, Quinn thinks, and _stupid, stupid, Quinn, fucking stupid_ \- he jerks the hammer head from the road again with grunt of effort, his muscles screaming, and tumbles it down into the forearm and wrist of this rock-hurling fuckcunt.

Adrenaline blots the crack of bone from his ears but Quinn, rain in his eyes, can see it, can see the dent, the fracture, the alien angles as they form. And he can hear the shrieks. The bones deform around the head of the hammer like a foot in a pool, and Quinn's body sings like a bird, on fire from the adrenal glands, awash with it as the street is with bloodied rainwater. And he can hear the shrieks like sirens.

Bert's yelling and the guy's yelling and they're yelling at each other: Quinn's ignoring them both, watching the guy on the ground, his shattered kneecaps, his broken wrist. He waits, his chest burning, his arms burning, his face a river of sweat and rain in one salt-water mix. He counts up to ten, and back down again.

The guy tries for his gun with his other hand, like Quinn knew he would, his fingers like flippers. And Quinn barely even lifts the hammer before dropping it hard on the guy's questing fingers like a bolt from the heavens, like the lightning that refuses to come.

They snap. They snap like breadsticks, like dry and brittle winter twigs underfoot, like fingers hit with a fucking sledgehammer.

He can hear the scream if not the break; Quinn steps back again, though he knows now that the chances of this rock-hurling fuckhole defending himself or making a grab are slim to none.

"Quinn," Bert says in a normal-volume Bert voice.

"Yeah?" Quinn doesn't tear his eyes from the bulk of the screaming guy in the road, not even when a drop of dirty rainwater splashes right in his corneas, falling from his hair.

"Quinn," Bert repeats, and it's a firm and beckoning call, pulling him back to Bert like a leash around his constricted throat; Quinn goes to him, panting, dragging the sledgehammer along the street behind him like a kid's safety blanket. Like he's freaking Linus. It leaves a wake, ripples in the bloodshot water, a speedboat in a shallow lake.

Bert gives him a non-smile and holds up bloody (his own blood, his scalp's blood), fingers under Quinn's nose, wipes a streak of his grease-adulterated scalp's blood on Quinn's cheek like an Indian stripe. "Mongoose," Bert says, his dark, weird eyes boring through Quinn's skull.

Night has hit them now, black and brown, still drooling down water from the cloying blanket of clouds. Bert puts a hand, palm-first, stinking and bloody, over Quinn's mouth and rises on the tips of his worn sneakers to kiss the back of his own hand as soft and languorous as a mouth; the song of threats issuing in a scream of agony behind him rises like it's a prom date scene in a teen movie, and Quinn turns back to the guy in the road as Bert pulls away.

The prick in the growing puddles is shouting every curse imaginable almost in alphabetical order, shouting threats he has no way to enact, no hope of following through.

Quinn smiles back down the empty street (he remembers it empty; Bert says there were cars) with steady purpose in his steps, the head of the hammer dragging a raspy, rippling fanfare behind him on the street surface. He might have taken his time, but Quinn needs momentum, so he strides faster and faster under the ghostly street lights, water splashing his legs, and as the prick's own legs flop and scrabble uselessly under him Quinn hefts the hammer into the air. As the prick tries to cover his head with his mangled arms, turning his face away as if that will save it, Quinn brings the hammer down on the cup of his pelvis so hard it tears a hole in his flesh.

Blood drains out in wide red flowers among the filthy overflow of storm drains; Quinn splashes through it, hauling the hammer back up until the head rests behind his hands; the crack of bone is an immense sound, but what rings in his ears now is the prick's cries. He's not yelling any more, just making a thin high sound of pain, pain, pain, a keening like a truck-smashed dog waiting to be shot, its tongue protruding for one last loyal lick of someone's boots. An involuntary whine that scrapes his brain like a rusty nail.

Quin balances the hammer head on the back of his hand. His arms ache and burn, his heart thumps, and his body is already punishing him with tight breaths and black dots. He loosens his grip so that the shaft will slide more easily in his hands.

"It's _raining_, fuckass," Bert shouts, like he can't possibly have noticed that for himself.

"Go suck a fat one," Quinn suggests.

The prick's splintered and bloody arms are coiled clumsily about his bloated idiot head and he's babbling and whining. Quinn can smell shit and piss over the blood and the rain and his own sweat-layered-on-BO. He readjusts his grip, and lets inertia and rage do the hardest work.

The first blow glances off an arm and staves in a cheek: he can hear the crunch and _plink_ of breaking teeth, of ripping gums beneath the flesh. The second smashes the nose and opposite orbit; the third is mere show as the prick's body jerks and slumps – he's already dead – and the next five are Quinn's howling red fury fastening its hands around his throat and driving him on.

The prick's head and arms are a wet smear on the asphalt, scattered with chunks like the remnants of a breakfast burrito. Quinn's shoulders hurt. He keeps the momentum.

"Quinn, you whore's tampon, it's _raining_," Bert yells, and there's an audible clink (over the rain and the rage and the river of blood Quinn's ankle-deep in) of beer bottles being picked up. Some splashing – Quinn's arms hurt so fucking much – and as he lets go of the hammer's shaft and it spins in the water, falling, falling, Bert pokes him in the small of the back with his elbow and says fondly, "No, _you_ go suck a fat one."

* * *

When he finally gets sentenced it's kinda a relief; Quinn has no idea what juvvie will be like at that moment, but he's figuring it will be better – or at least no worse – than the junior high he is spending six months in a juvenile detention centre for trying to torch. At least the faces he wants to smash will be different and, Quinn thinks, that may be all he has to hope for in his life; a change of hated faces. Different names to spit.

Juvvie is quite a lot like hell, but it's also a lot like some of the residential care homes he's been in, only with more regular meals.

Quinn learns more from juvvie than he did from junior high:

\- how to boost a car  
\- how to make a shank from a phone card or a plastic bag  
\- how much he never wants to suck a dick  
\- how much speed makes him majorly psychotic  
\- fifteen different ways of saying 'police'.

He administers a few lessons of his own, too:

\- don't spit in Quinn Allman's fucking food.  
\- don't steal Quinn Allman's fucking sneakers.  
\- don't assume that Quinn Allman, the scrawny fuck with the wonky teeth, is going to be an easy mark  
\- don't touch Quinn Allman's dick. Ever.

He gets his first tattoo. It is smeary and done in ballpoint ink and a smuggled sewing needle. Years later he will use convenience store robbery money to have it covered over professionally. It reads '4 LIFE', though he knows nothing is.

He sees a state-funded youth psychologist once a week for those six months, and he learns what a pack of limp-dicked smug rich pussies the entire profession are, pretty damn quick.

One thing Quinn does not learn in juvvie is how to control his temper.

"Count to ten before saying or doing anything," says Dr Gerald Leigh, a nylon suit that perspires in the cold yellow-painted office in which Quinn spends an hour a week slumped in a grey chair, picking his scabs and spitting on the rough carpet.

"Fuck yourself," Quinn says, after counting to ten.

Dr. Leigh winces. "Count back down from ten. Take a deep breath and remember that your actions, Quinn, have consequences."

"… four, three, two, one, fuck your mom," Quinn suggests, his eyebrows drawing together in a squiggly line of rage. Dr. Leigh wears a cheap suit and a cheap watch in the hopes of camouflaging himself, but he ruins it with fraternity cufflinks and hair that is too artfully towsled to be accidental. And he smells too clean. And Quinn hates him.

"Do you want to talk about your mother?" Dr. Leigh seizes on it like a paedo on a toddler.

"I heard it was five cents to come on your mom's face," Quinn snaps, his stomach a raging mess of bruises and hate. There is nothing in the office but two chairs – bolted down – him, Dr. Leigh, and Dr. Leighs clipboard. The juvvie staff have been running this dump since the seventies and they know not to leave anything that can be thrown or smashed: the windows have narrow bars six inches in front of them and Dr. Leigh sits nearest the door.

Quinn starts working his sneaker off his heel with the toe of his other foot.

There is a red panic button on the wall by Dr. Leigh's head and two wardens outside who know, Quinn knows, a variety of restraining moves that will leave him bruised, scratched, and vibrating with impotent fury. Quinn slips his sneaker off and bends at the waist.

"Quinn, unless you learn to keep your emotions in check you're going to spend a lot of time in places like this," Dr. Leigh says, "and that is a waste of a life."

This is bullshit. Quinn already has his emotions in check. He hasn't cried since he was ten – it does no good – and he rarely smiles. He's got everything under fucking control.

"I'm here to help you help yourself," Dr. Leigh is a slogan-spouting machine, a meaningless font of crackerjack wisdom.

"_I'm_ here to help myself," Quinn says, "to your skank mom's pussy."

"You are rather preoccupied with mothers, Quinn. Are you sure you wouldn't like to discuss yours?" Dr. Leigh is barely paying attention. It's quite clear he's thinking about coffee and how many more appointments he has before he can drive home to his fat bitch wife; his wedding ring is new enough to shine unscratched, they probably still fuck. Quinn thinks they probably call each other by name while they do it: "establishing a rapport". And just like that he's horny.

He _hates_ being horny. It's like an itch on the inside of his balls.

Quinn throws his sneaker square in Dr. Leigh's stupid wife-fucking smug rich pussy face.

The next five or ten minutes are chaotic but predictable: Quinn only manages to lay two punches before he's struggling and writhing against well-trained arms, popping up into the air like a leaping catfish, spitting and snarling and scratching – a feral animal caught in a net.

He is never given that sneaker back.

* * *

Quinn smells of dumpster. The dumpster also smells of dumpster. He dozes on rain-soaked card boxes, his arms wrapped over his faced like a canopy in the cool spring night. It's been two weeks this time and his foster parents haven't found him yet; nor have the police. Quinn is prepared to accept that they probably aren't looking all that hard for a skinny, ugly boy with blurry tats right near the edges of adulthood.

His stomach hurts and he doesn't know if it's hunger (he hasn't eaten for two days now), sickness (the last thing he ate was not exactly haute cuisine), or the fight he had with a hobo last night.

It ended in a win – he got the guy's half-bottle of Thunderbird and drank most of it before tipping the rest on the railway lines and flinging the empty bottle at the level crossing barriers – but he didn't _stop_ at winning. The smell of honeysuckle winding in the sidings ate up his nostrils with every kick and punch into the porous old sack of shit; Quinn doesn't know if the guy was alive or dead when he left and which he is now.

The dumpster vibrates with the force of a blow and he worms as silently as he can to the hole in the side where a bolt must once have been; standing up is asking to be smashed in with a pistol butt if it's the cops and _shot_ if it's anyone else.

Two dicks are beating someone up.

It's not his fight, but Quinn can feel his gorge and his ire rising like a bad pizza in his throat. It's not his fight, but one of the pricks doing the kicking is wearing a letterman jacket and the other a blazer and that's all Quinn actually _needs_.

He smacks one of them in the ear with a perfectly-aimed fist-sized lump of concrete and he goes down like a cheap hooker – badly and hard. There's blood.

Quinn's out of the dumpster like he's electric, heading for the blazer-wearing fuckhole as fast as his hunger will let him, which is not fast enough.

He gets a fist full of fraternity ring in the side of the head and it sends him temporarily deaf, the _whumpwhump_ of his heart all he can hear. Quinn doesn't shake his head to clear it – then he'd lose track of the asshole – just squeezes his eyes into tight points of concentration as the red rises in his veins. He ignores the body on the floor bleeding from the head and he ignores the wet skeleton draped, slumped against the dumpster like so much discarded garbage, for now.

This time he gets a first blow in. His foot is almost bare, the canvas sneaker is a mere nod to footwear, but he has heels as hard as granite and kicking someone in the side of the knee can usually be relied upon to slow them down.

And that's it. The guy roars, and Quinn's on his face, his hands, like a man-animal, scratching and thumping and digging his knees in hard enough to dislocate ribs. He smacks the guy's head off the alley floor, but his eyes are still lit and he's still a threat – Quinn yanks the rich prick's head back up by its floppy shitty hair-gelled hair and slams it twice more. He bites the guy's nose closed on the fourth yank, to knock him out. His hands lock around his throat.

"Hey," says a quiet, kinda effeminate voice.

Quinn's breaths are not deep enough; he feels faint.

"Hey," repeats the voice, "I don't think he's gonna get up now, we should go."

Quinn tears himself off the blazer-wearing rich jerk-off like a band-aid from a crotch wound and wheel around to face this suggestion, a snarl on his lips.

The first thing he's struck by are the eyes. The guy – he can't be any older than Quinn – is a dripping doodle of a midget meth case, starved skinny and ratty hair stuck to his face with his own blood, but his eyes are unbelievable. Darker than Quinn's nightmares, deeper than basements, digging right into Quinn's mind and unlocking it like they know what's in there and _want_ it.

"What do you want?" the meth-head asks, low, like anyone's conscious to hear him and like it matters. "I can blow you if that's what you want." He says it earnestly, but Quinn senses he's said it a lot before tonight.

"_No_," Quinn snaps, beginning to panic.

"No?" the head tilt is a bit much. He looks like a puppy someone's been starving in a basement somewhere.

"Don't touch my fucking dick," Quinn growls. He's said _that_ so often he's worn a hole in his cheek.

"Okay," the meth-head tucks a strand of hair behind his ear like a little girl, and starts to giggle, high and cracked and crazy-sounding. "We should get out of here." The words and the laughter contrast so vividly that Quinn feels like he's hallucinating. And the meth-head says, "You have blood on your nose," with the most dazzling smile Quinn has ever seen outside of a TV screen.

* * *

He doesn't think about Brandon much. It makes his lungs bleed; if Brandon hadn't taken everything and left, Quinn wouldn't have fetched up two hollow fucking years in jail.

Jail nearly kills him.

It's not an exaggeration. He skates so close to his own death in there that he can feel the cold creeping into his limbs like a night visitor; Quinn doesn't like to think about that, either.

One year in, he finds out. It already killed his little brother, that's what he finds out. A face he can barely remember, dead of prison. Dead of jail. The inmates say:

Hey Allman. Allman. Faggot. Allman. You know Riley Allman, Allman? You look like him. Allman. Hey, Allman. No-man. Faggot. Allman. You know that faggy little hooker Riley?

Quinn thinks of a tangled green jungle and the Spaceman Explorers and carrying a nut-brown toddler on his back on the way to the store, bouncing up and down till he laughs. He remembers the smell of child-spit on his little brother's thumb and their couch with the puke stain on it and their kicking contests and the one channel of TV and he says, "No."

Hey Allman, you should check out his exit route.

"_What_?" because he can't stop himself.

And they make grisly choking noises through the wall and laugh and laugh and laugh and someone yells LACES and they laugh and laugh and Quinn … Quinn spends a month in solitary after he sets his cell on fire.

Jail nearly kills him and for that month he wishes it had.

When he gets out they're waiting, Jepha and Bert. Jepha has five new tattoos and a gold tooth; Bert's hair is the colour of dried snot.

"He dyed it green for St Patty's," Jepha explains, Bert pinching him in the side so he squirms and groans, "and then it wouldn't come off."

"Did you make any new friends at your new schooool, Quinnery-Quinn-Face?" Bert asks, and Quinn lifts his arm and rolls up his sleeve to show him his burn scar – bleach on the forearm. A blur of pink and angry flesh.

"Well aren't _you_ popular," Bert coos, and he snickers, and snaps the sagging elastic of Quinn's underpants.

They're squatting in a million dollar mansion, for fuck's sake. The surrealism spins Quinn out as they duck under the fence and Jepha TA-DAAAAs with a flourish and a glittering grin. Quinn lies down on $300 Egyptian cotton sheets, grimy and scarred and sweating, and sleeps for twenty straight hours, bent into an S between Bert's shoulder and Jepha's knees. It is the most comfortable he's been in two fucking years, and he can't even kid himself it's the bed.

He wakes to Bert gnawing on his shoulder blade.

"God," Quinn mutters sleepily, making no move to push him away, "just fucking die already."

Jepha insists he try some iced tea. He makes a big production of it, uses half the shit in the kitchen, strutting around in a stolen silk robe and waving silver sugar tongs. It tastes vile; Quinn says he'd rather drink piss.

Predictably, Bert pisses in a mug and hands it to him; predictably, Quinn throws it over him.

It's another two years before he recognises what he's feeling now and knows it to be gratitude.

* * *

They have tried everything else.

_Everything_, Shirley emphasises with tired conviction. Her hair is perm-set into curls and she is not a natural blonde, but she will not paint her nails because that is vanity. Quinn wonders what 'everything' she means; there have been increasingly aggressive baptisms, and exorcisms, and if that's _everything_ then TV has been lying to him in all those commercials. There are a thousand brand names - Ritalin, diazepam, Valium - but Shirley and Heath believe only in the restorative and heavy-handed love of the Almighty Father. And, now, in their desperation, in "doctor" Robert Temple.

It is called Attachment Therapy.

Five years later, Quinn will sample mescaline in a parking lot with a guy called Fox Daley who has a face like a kicked turtle and it will mess with his head less than what he is about to experience. After all this, prison will make a dirty kind of sense.

They tell him he's manipulative. That he will turn into a psychopath if he doesn't give in and learn to form a proper attachment to his foster mother. They tell him it's his 'birth mother's fault for not taking care of him enough that he didn't have to be adopted out.

Food, water, and clothes to sleep in in the winter. He has to earn these things, Shirley says as she checks her list, Robert Temple's list. Adults have to earn food and water and shelter. They are not _given_ them for nothing.

When they catch him stealing from the trash the first time Heath straps him to a kitchen chair. They check Robert Temple's list for instructions, and leave him here for a day, one full cycle of twenty-four hours. Nothing he says is believed: he is trying to manipulate them, Shirley says, and his deceit must end if he wants to be freed, and fed. This is what they tell him. Quinn pisses himself at six the next evening after three hours of pain in his bladder, but they won't let him get up.

He's nine, Shirley says, but he behaves like a wild animal. He's always in fights. He's sullen and mistrustful. He's like a wild animal.

Quinn objects to this assessment, albeit internally.

Wild animals cannot read and write. Wild animals don't figure out that a disposable lighter and an aerosol deodorant make a flame-thrower capable of scorching eyebrows from a distance. Wild animals don't unscrew the blades from their foster-father's razor so that the next time some prick at school tries to flush _their_ heads in a dirty toilet bowl, it will not end with their hair full of turds.

But he doesn't say anything.

Food has to be earned, Shirley says, and his crocodile tears will not change their minds. He must learn to be a dutiful and obedient little boy and to stop wetting the bed. Once a week they drive to Robert Temple's house for Rebirthing Therapy: once a week Quinn screams and kicks and bites and spits and scratches paintwork with his feet as Shirley and Heath MacElhatton try to shove him into their mint-green station wagon.

He is taped into a blanket and told to struggle, so Quinn lies still. He lies still and fakes unconsciousness and hopes they will go away until he is thirsty and bored; they tell him to struggle. Someone lies on top of him until he can no longer breathe - they tell him he has to fight to be born, and he will reconnect with his new mother and father once he has.

Quinn writhes and thrashes and tries to bite them through the heavy blankets that taste of motor oil and fear. He bangs his head on the floor to knock himself out but only makes himself puke, and then he has to fight inside a Quinn-sized bag of his own vomit. It is like being stuck in a nightmare that never ends, that he never wakes from.

When it does end each week Shirley holds him to her like a baby and Quinn is too exhausted to fight her any more. He hates silently and passionately as she holds him. He wishes her cancer, AIDS, heart attacks, he wishes her things he's only ever heard of on TV or seen written in bathroom stalls. He wishes her drowned in her own puke, like he feels he's going to be each time. He wishes her bleeding, burning, and above all, _dead_.

Strapping him to a chair doesn't seem to be effecting a change in his attitude to food (effecting a change, not "working", the language is precise). He still steals, they tell Robert Temple. Robert's moustache, thick and black as a pubic wig, twitches like it's electrified. He makes a suggestion.

The next time Quinn is caught stealing food from the trash it is a chicken carcass with only a little meat still clinging to it. He has already hidden out-of-date stale hotdog rolls in his room, and a bunch of bananas that are more black than yellow. The next time Quinn is caught stealing food from the trash Shirley and Heath follow Robert Temple's suggestion to the letter, and lock him in the basement.

Quinn spends his tenth birthday in the basement.

He cries for a while, but he gets bored, and thirsty. The tears change nothing and bring no one, and it is the last time that he cries. He hunches up by the door like a sentry and presses his face to the crack of light that spills onto the top step, and he stays there. And he stays there. And he stays there. He stays there until the light goes away and the pipes begin to clang with stored heat and shower water, and he stays there until the pipe nearest his temple heats up, and he stays there until his skin sticks to it in the heat and the pain is too much to bite back with teeth jabbed into his tongue.

When he stops being dizzy from yelling, dizzy from burns, dizzy from thirst, Quinn gets up off the step and feels his way down with bare feet on the dusty wooden stairs. He feels his way down into the dripping dark, where the rats are.

And he stays _there_.

* * *

"Quinn."

Quinn's body aches like it's been hit by a truck and his eyes are slimy and shut. He tries to open them, and the light hurts almost as much as a punch.

"Quinn," the voice repeats, and he finds himself looking at the cap of a water bottle in extreme pale blue close-up. It waggles up and down. "French clouds pissed this just for _you_, Quinn," Dan says gravely, "don't disappoint the French clouds."

Quinn's hands shake as he fights to unscrew the cap and he can't lift his head properly. Every movement has to be thought through like an equation. The shower is cold and the water is not falling so heavily as before; Dan is sitting on the toilet seat wearing Superman boxers and a solitary sports sock, his hair crazy and his bug eyes saucer-wide like he's fending off sleep with cartoon match-sticks.

"Fuck you," Quinn croaks, trying to sip now he's fumbled the cap off. The water just gets on his cheek.

"In my country we make medicine dick, fuck you better again," Dan acknowledges in an insane all-purpose foreign voice and Quinn chokes on his water with an involuntary laugh. "Medicine dick illegal in America," Dan acknowledges sadly. "It have too much processed sugar. Also, involves rape."

Quinn splutters and laughs and gets some water down in the confusion. Dan leans forwards on the seat - no oil painting he but one of the most welcome sights of the night so far – and brushes hair from Quinn's forehead.

"I forgot to bring bacon," Dan adds as Quinn tries to force more water into his body, slipping one huge hand under Quinn's ear, holding it out of the shower tray so he can drink. "I was going to fry some bacon on your ass."

"Fucker," Quinn chokes on more water – Dan plucks the bottle from his unprotesting fingers with surgical precision, slamming the cap back on with his huge, huge palm.

"You go to sleep, you die," Dan admonishes, letting his head fall back in the cold water as Quinn shuts his eyes.

"_Everyone fucking dies_," Quinn mutters, hardly lucid enough now to know what he's even saying. It's just a stock phrase, something under his skin. He'll start chanting shit from his childhood in a minute.

"Yeah," Dan says, and Quinn hears him get to his feet. "Everyone dies."

He never believed in fate, not anything like that, but he knows when they see the bulging hulk of Dan Whitesides getting off the prison bus that this one is theirs. That he's going to be theirs. That he's right.

They watch him like rats from the shelter of the bins at the back of the Co-Op. Jepha's wearing a hat that hides his face in shadow, Quinn's wrapped one hand in a torn-up child's nightie he stole from a laundry line in the ghetto. His hand is torn and bleeding, because stone bites back when he punches.

When Dan comes and asks them, lurking and leaning on the Co-Op wall, for directions to anyone who might have a room to rent, they take him home. To the place that serves, right now, as home.

He smokes pot with them and cracks stupid jokes, really stupid jokes, stupider than Bert's, and Quinn laughs and surprises himself, then laughs because he's surprised. Dan looks at Jepha like a dog looks at meat, and Jepha looks at him like a dog looks at its owner, and Dan comments that for a basement full of standing water and strangers the place feels weirdly like home.

It's not the place. It's the people. And Dan's theirs. Right from the start.

At first Quinn kids himself it's for Jepha, that they found Dan because Jepha needed him, needed him like a hole he never even knew he had, among all those other empty needy places that Jepha has; but they found Dan for all of them, including for Dan.

Quinn's raging so hard he can't breathe. It happens sometimes – the black and the red in him clot in his lungs and his mind and all he knows is hate, his vision blurring and his body hurling him from spot to spot like he can't stop it. He's already destroyed the kitchen, a hurricane of violent fury tearing everything to shreds. Tearing everything down. Quinn wants to burn the world.

He's in flames, inflamed, his anger framed by smashing crockery (it's not their house, it's never their house) and it no longer matters what tripped the switch in his mind, he's stuck like this. Stuck in his hate.

Jepha has a bruise on his chest from trying to hold him still, trying to hold him, and they all now it's no use pinioning Quinn now. Just let it end, just pick up the pieces afterwards, just sift through the wreckage through things that are still whole.

He dimly registers Dan slipping out of the kitchen door into the yard. He wouldn't ordinarily blame him for it; Dan is new, and Quinn knows somewhere in the one remaining rational part of him, behind the shriek and the sneer of his emotional maelstrom and clenched fists that he is more than a little frightening like this. Sometimes … sometimes he admits it afterwards, sometimes he admits … sometimes he scares himself, too. But right now he's not into forgiveness and he hates everyone and everything with body-breaking passion, including Dan and himself and breathing.

Quinn loses a chunk of time – he's not sure how long, the light doesn't change much – and finds himself in one of the bedrooms. There is the wreckage of a bed around him to testify to what has been going on and why his hands are bleeding, a hail of fallen feathers carpeting the room like an exercise in physical irony. Some of them are bloody. The owners of this house are going to get a nasty fuck of a shock when they get back from their fucking vacation.

The door creaks and an arm enters, holding an ice-cream, unwrapped and pink, by the end of the stick. It's so bizarre an image at this moment that Quinn jolts and passes a hand before his eyes. His hand is bleeding from a hundred splintery cuts. He is not hallucinating.

"I got a visit from the ice-cream fairy," Dan says, deadpan as ever, "I went to the store to boost some band-aids for your hand and this pink twinkly bitch with a headband on came out of the freezer and gave me this." The ice-cream waves from side to side like a metronome. "It's maaaagic."

"What does it do?" Jepha asks, muffled by the door and possibly Dan's shoulder. He talks into Dan's shoulder a lot.

"It _melts_," Bert snickers.

"The fairy said I had to give it to a pure soul, but I said you wanted an ice-cream and _she_ said, what, Quinnery Allman? You can't fucking give it to _him_, he's a fuckass." Dan continues, waggling the ice-cream and probably his eyebrows, although all Quinn can see of him is his forearm. "So I punched her in the cunt."

Quinn starts to laugh in spite of the hate. It hurts, he's wheezing, and his eyes sting. His muscles are turning from steel to water.

"And _that_ is why it melted," Dan adds forlornly, "it got stuck up a fairy's cunt. Those bitches are _warm_."

And with that Quinn breaks out and full-on howls a laugh until he's on the floor on his side, sniggering and clutching himself, part pained, part hysterical. Dan drops the ice-cream on the carpet by his head.

Bert's there like he didn't have to move, tickling and tickling – Quinn's not actually ticklish but he laughs anyhow, and rolls onto the ice-cream (smearing virulent unnatural pink cold up his back) and laughs even more, until he's giddy and sick.

"Compress it," Bert sings, like they're on Sesame Street and he's advising Quinn about tying shoes or some shit, "compress it, contain it, compound, confound it, and _point it where it matters_."

Wheezing and gasping, Quinn nods and wipes melted ice-cream on Bert's leg. Bert tries to lick it off and cackles himself as he just cracks his head on Quinn's elbow. "Your mom," Bert adds, looking Quinn deep in the eye as they lie side by side on ice-creamy, bloody, feathered carpet, "is a dirty skank ho with an ass like Mars. Don't forget that, Quinnery-Quinnhead, don't ever forget it."

Dan says thoughtfully, "Bitch was _pink_."

And they get stoned; they sit down in the ruined room and smoke everything they got.

It happens a lot. The smell of pot smoke is like the breath of calm that snakes into Quinn's lungs and quiets the burning. After he gets fired from another industrial shit hole he steals an industrial hellhole's diamond, reasoning that the chemical burns on the roof of his fucking mouth from breathing without a mask are more than excuse enough.

The green binds the four of them together like spit and tape: Dan is propped up against a wall and Quinn's kind of curled up on the floor with his head on Dan's lap while Dan sort of strokes his hair flat, and they're both stoned, and they've got their eyes half-open to watch Jepha blowing Bert.

If he wasn't so high he could chase the moon and stars on a scooter made of smoke, Quinn would not be lying with his ear against Dan's thigh and Dan would not be using his freakishly large hands to groom him like someone's pet. Jepha probably would be blowing Bert regardless, but they wouldn't be united in this lazy-limbed almost-peace watching a master at work. Quinn's hand rests slow and lazy on his half-hard dick, and Dan says, "Want me to?"

And Quinn says, "No."

And Bert says, "No one touches his dick," with quiet firmness.

But Quinn stays all bonelessly relaxed. His teeth are still chattering a little, because there were asshole idiots on the corner on the way here, because the adrenaline from fights takes so long to go away, and Dan rubs the back of his neck with his thumb, willing the shit out of his body and into his lungs, out into the air.

Jepha's holding the underside of Bert's thigh in his palm, holding him still, and his other hand is fingers twisted together with Dan's giant Dan hand, his arm stretched over the floor slightly too far to be comfortable. Not that comfort is ever Jepha's first concern, Quinn thinks almost wryly, and the thought fires a spark and he squeezes his dick again.

Bert's smoking, blowing rings into the thick stale air, and petting him, stroking behind his ear in long, slow circles with his shorts puddled around his ankles like a little boy peeing in a roadside verge; his back bent that little bit, hips out. Jepha lies over his shorts like a beach towel, blowing as slow and lazy as Bert's hand on his ear, as Dan's hand on Quinn's head, as Quinn's hand on his dick. They're all syrupy with pot, united in lassitude, _content_.

Home this time is just some furnitureless room in an abandoned house off a side street off a main street off a shitty nowhere town somewhere in Delaware. Fucking _Delaware_. The wallpaper is ripped and there's blood on the banisters and there's an undercurrent of hauntings and loss of hope, the basement filled with bottles of bleach, the payphone ripped out of the wall, the fart scent of a local waste plant too close for any buyer. Window is covered in card and gaffer tape. There are no mattresses on the beds, and one of them sports half a broken handcuff.

Bert makes up lullabies about kidnapping victims and Quinn turns them pornographic. Dan makes up jokes about the police raping kids in the back of the house and Jepha says, "Stop," and Dan stops as abruptly as if Jepha slit his throat.

_Quinn makes a noise like "hrnk" and sits down on the garden wall, his chest straining like a road-wounded cat. He grips the old brick top with both hands and tries to steady himself to rise again. _

Bert licks the ball of his thumb and smears the blood from Quinn's eyelashes. Shuffles between his knees, and kisses him on the eyelids. "Quinn," Bert says seriously, quietly, "stop now."

The thud and thump of adrenaline that's making his arms and legs shake like he's having a fit, that begins slowly to drain. "Hrnk", he says again, his throat opening a little more. Everything smells of copper.

Bert tangles one hand into what's left of Quinn's increasingly thin hair and kisses his scalp. "Fuck yourself," he adds, just as serious, his joint smouldering between the fingers of his other hand.

The smell of pot smoke is a blanket around his raging mind; Quinn's five years old again, naked and giggling in the green safety of his overgrown front yard, grass up to his waist and ants crawling over his toes. So he doesn't object when Dan sits down beside him and puts his wide weird face on Quinn's shoulder, and Jepha stands behind him and strokes the back of his neck with the heel of his hand.

Quinn finally unclenches his teeth and spits the finger out.

They need each other.

Dan is a bottomless well of sadness with scars like highways from palm to elbow, red-white highways of shiny scar tissue. He has edge tats that lie, and hands like catcher's mitts and he cracks jokes about anything and he fucks Jepha like he's painting a masterpiece himself.

Quinn doesn't approve of much but he approves very much of Dan Whitesides: a bottomless well of unvoiced sadness into which Quinn could hurl his bitter anger forever without reaching something he can hurt, pour it and pour it out. And knowing that … he doesn't.

* * *

The sun is a burning yellow gobstopper suspended in a lake of blue spit the day Quinn's heart breaks and his hate starts.

He is six years old and wearing faded green short-shorts, his hair unruly and too long. His sister is flicking pebbles at his knees and Riley is dreaming three-year-old's dreams on the porch, an old newspaper spread out and pulled over his face like he's a banker on the beach.

They ignore the car. Twenty years later in a truck stop outside Joplin, Missouri, Quinn will find himself desperate to burn a rust-red Toyota and not know why; six years old and the half-naked boy king of a front yard kingdom Quinn views the red-orange vehicle with disinterest and hollers, "MISSED ME!" in triumph as he dances away from Lilith's latest missile.

She is five and bony with a face that, he keeps telling her, looks like a horse's butt. She is his favourite horse's butt in all the world even when she's trying to drive him into the briars that flank the right side of the path.

"Are your Mommy and Daddy home?" asks a honeyed voice from the heights of suit pants, a breath of chemical perfume spiralling down to Quinn's nose. The woman's head is silhouetted against the sun she's wearing flat leather shoes. Sensible shoes, and perfume.

"They went to the store," Lilith says in a bored voice, throwing another rock at Quinn and making him dance back like a terrier at a rat hole. "Wait onna porch."

"Lilith you _bitch_ I wasn't ready!" Quinn shouts, picking up pebble and throwing it back at her. It hits her knee and she calls him a word five-year-old girls are not meant to know.

The stranger goes into the house without asking.

"Dad's gonna freak," Lilith observes.

"Shut _up_," Quinn steps off the path onto the weeds and cranes up on his dirty tip-toes. He can't see the woman at all.

"Time you came with us," says a man's voice from the car.

"_Why_?" Quinn doesn't like the car. It looks hot and stuffy, and when his parents return from the story there is often ice-cream. These people have little to offer him.

"We're going to take you to a better home, Quinn," says the man. Quinn scoffs; there can be no better home than this ramshackle kingdom of peeling paint boards and sprawling weeds. "Boy your age should be in school."

"School is a tool of The System to keep you from seeing the truth," Lilith and Quinn chant in prompt and staggered unison. They learnt this _ages_ ago. The man in the car must be very stupid if he doesn't know that.

The woman comes out of the house again, looking all wrong against the flaking painted boards and the broken porch struts, the remains of a mural of the rising sun that's long been in need of retouching. "I left them the letter," she says, talking to the man in the car. "They've only themselves to blame for this. The other letters _have_ been opened, and I'm sure I saw … drugs paraphernalia … in there." She sniffs.

"Are you the FBI?" Lilith asks with polite interest, her hands dangling between her knees. She's weighing another pebble and Quinn braces himself to jump.

"No, we're –"

"Are you the IRS?" Quinn asks, fascinated. He's never been able to work out what the IRS actually are from his father's cryptic ranting, but he'd always thought they'd have guns and he's a little disappointed.

"We're from Social Services," the woman says, and there is a gap in Quinn's memory after that. It returns in fragments, flashes, shards of experience. He is outside himself and looking in at the little boy screaming and screaming and struggling like a feral cat in the back of a car that is driving away, driving him away.

The first lesson Quinnery Allman ever really learns is that being different is a license to be fucked; he learns this when They come and take him (and later, his brother and sister) away.

His parents are "unfit" because they grow pot and don't wear shoes to the store and let Quinn and his little siblings run around naked in the front yard. Most of all they are unfit because they're not Mormons. That's the real reason.

He is six.

The first lesson Quinn learns is that the world is full of fucking assholes and they're all out to fuck him over, and he learns it good and hard, looking back, looking from the outside of himself at the little boy he used to be, scraggly and wonky-toothed:

He screams until he chokes and his face is red and slimy with snot, slimy with tears and spit, and he thrashes and kicks and bites until he's bruised and scratched, hoarse and red and raw, battering himself against the windows. Screaming and screaming and screaming as his house disappears into dreams. Into the past. Into memory. As his house disappears through the back window of a rust-red car.

* * *

In Vegas they park cars for money. Valet parking for a casino, which is hilarious on several levels. Quinn wears a visor, an itchy orange shirt, and no trace of the plastic smile his petulant and power-hungry teenage supervisor has instructed him to wear. He has a new tattoo, a urinary tract infection, and brass knuckles in his hip pocket.

One of the Viagra-popping scum in a car that fails to compensate for his bald pate even if he thinks it does for his penis, with a red avalanche of a face, tells Quinn imperiously that no one will tip him if he doesn't learn to treat service as a serious endeavour and to give the customer 110%. Quinn, who at least _passed_ his goddamn fucking math classes before he was excluded from the public school system, sneers at this and steals the jerk's car.

It is silver and soft-topped and has a cream leather interior, which Quinn spits on. It handles like a high-class hooker and the first thing Bert does in it is to wipe a handful of snotty saliva over half of the airplane array of pointless dials and lights. The next is to kick the fake mahogany cover off the glove box and put a peanut-butter sandwich in there.

"We need sunglasses," Bert says decisively. He means to pose in them, but with the desert glare and reflections from every shining window Quinn's squinting and he craves some darkness for his overworked eyes.

Jepha will say later that it's the car that made him stick his thumb out and smile hopefully, thinking they were rich business dicks looking for some white trash action; Bert will say that they would have stopped whether his thumb was out or not.

They're on the outskirts of town in this stolen silver monster penis replacement and the sky is overcast and full of carrion birds, not the kind of desert that affords much promise. It's not a Thelma and Louise desert, Bert points out miserably. "Where's my goddamn dyke adventure?" he complains, "Where's my lesbians in cowboy hats?"

He is tearing pages from a motel bible and folding them into origami swans before releasing them into the car's pitiful slipstream. He stares at where the sun ought to be and says the secret to all science is patterns. Quinn says, "Uh-huh," and his stomach growls.

"Hey, stop," Bert instructs suddenly.

By the side of the road, four hundred yards down from a gas station that looks empty of gas and customers, by a fluttering streamer of Police Crime Scene Do Not Cross tape, someone is hitching.

He is short and slight (the car gains on him) and wearing a red sleeveless t-shirt (and gains) and he is heavily tattooed (and gains), one sleeve already completed. Painfully open smile (the car halts and idles), and he has red scrapes on his knuckles.

Quinn rests his cheek on the hot off-white steering wheel and watches as the hitcher's face lights up with hope and confusion, which Bert then compounds eagerly by shrieking, "HI WE HAVE SUNGLASSES AND LIQUOR!" in one of his most fearsomely outdoor voices.

They do, it's true. There are fourteen pairs of cheap sunglasses and two quarts of Jim Beam on the back seat, sliding around like fish in a net.

"Hi," says the hitcher, hoisting himself and his bag over the rear door of the car and landing with a slithery thump among their strange treasures. "Thanks."

"So where are you going?" Bert asks like it makes a difference. The gas station begins to slip away and Quinn fixes his eyes on the rear view mirror as much as he can without going off the road.

"Away," the hitcher shrugs. "Anywhere. I just … don't want to stay in Vegas any longer." His smile in the mirror is sweet and slightly evasive and speckled with piercings; Quinn's never really thought the word 'sweet' about anyone before, and the dissonance makes him stall the car.

"Jesus, it's not _that_ shocking," the hitcher says and Bert gives a strangled squawk of laughter that's clearly taken him as much by surprise as the car jerking to a stop.

"We're going, too," Bert says, and Quinn doesn't need to look in any of the mirrors to know the hypnotic, penetrating stare he's fixed to the hitcher's pretty face like post-its. "You should come with us."

That smile again, faintly shy and slightly crooked, and a cautious, "Okay."

They still have the silver car when Quinn _learns_ about Jepha. Learns about him in the way that ... the way that he's learnt about Bert, learns about what's lying underneath his skin, kinda - though with Jepha it's on his skin, too. Not exactly a secret, written out in plain English for anyone to read.

They're parked, fighting aimlessly about where they're heading and no one has a map and no one has a clue and they're hungry and tired and the car stinks of unwashed boys.

So: Quinn makes some boring your mom gag on general principles, and Jeph calls him fag and rolls his eyes, and Quinn punches him in the throat without really thinking about it and the moment that follows that punch is a long slow one, where the guy with scabbed knuckles Quinn thought was a fighter (and knows used to be a whore) turns out to be made of jello and there's another moment as he realises: dude's popped a chubby - and then everything makes sense, a kind of sense.

He pulls back and stares away over the empty fields (they've come a long way, and potatoes are out of season) with his face half-burning, shame and rage and understanding, and Jeph makes a boneless, catlike sound and slides down the torn leather interior like someone cut his strings. He arches towards Quinn's hands and makes another noise that's half-animal and half-man and all sex.

"I'm not," Quinn says quietly, clenching his fists. "I'm not going to."

And because Bert knows him better than he knows himself, he turns in the shotgun seat and puts his eye to the gap between headrest and backrest and says, "_I'm_ going to."

Just because he can't see where Bert's put his hand doesn't mean Quinn doesn't know he's feeling himself up. And Jepha grins that placid slow metal-pocked grin and Quinn punches the inside of the car door two or three times, sort of slap-punches it with the back of his hand, tense and in turmoil.

Bert says, "I'm going to and you can watch."

Because he knows Quinn all too well, and he knows what he needs, like they know now what Jepha needs.

Bert and Jepha don't actually fuck all that much, in the end: Quinn sits on a single bed feeling kind of lost and kind of horny and watches Bert stroke Jepha's naked illustrated body like he's exploring a Braille map and petting a kitten all at once, watches Jepha arch and gibber into his touch. Watches Bert bite and pinch and thump and drive his thumbs into Jepha's windpipe 'til he comes; comes and flops like he's been deboned.

It's a courtesy fuck and they all know it, giving Jepha as close to what he needs as they can all manage. And Quinn can hardly manage to touch him.

It's just as well, Bert explains, using the sleepy and contented table of Jepha's inky belly to roll a joint that's lumpier than a cancer milkshake; Quinn can't touch Jepha really or they'll both implode. Jepha starts laughing and Quinn, contrary to the absolute fucking hilt, slaps him to stop him shaking the weed off onto the sheets.

Jepha is Quinn's negative space, Bert insists, smoking up. They're matter and anti-matter, anima and animus, yin and fucking yang.

"You need to smoke less," Quinn advises, snatching the joint from him. "Your head's fucked."

"My head's fucked _your mom_, I wore her like a hat," Bert retorts, all his grand talk of matter and animus dissolving into so much library book mush as he waggles his abnormally huge tongue at Quinn and Quinn pulls a hideous face in return.

But he's right – infuriating but right, like always. Jepha's never angry, Quinn's never calm; Jepha's thirsty for touch as a desert river for the rain, soaking affection into his thousands of hidden cracks, and Quinn can hardly stand it when he's straight-up and sober. Maybe they're the same person who went different ways—

"Maybe _your mom_," Bert snickers, and Jepha covers his face with his hands and says, 'help', in a voice of quiet resignation.

* * *

The light is dim and sick on his skin and Quinn _feels_ the word "sallow" in his mind. The water he's lying in smells and he's almost sure he's pissed himself, thinking of basements and brothers and broken memories like shards of beer bottles embedded in his flesh. Even the thought process is hallucinatory.

Someone is in the bathroom with him. Quinn can hear breathing, shallow and slow, and he clenches into a tighter foetus-shape, an embryo of adult proportions in the un-nurturing cold water-and-piss-and-soap that's absorbed into his clothes. His foot is blocking the drain and he can't move.

"Hey, Quinn."

He opens an eye. Naked from the waist down and bruised like a leopard, dark-on-pale amid the tattoos, the Illustrated Jepha Howard. Crouching by the shower stall in a sweaty Jems t-shirt at the right angle for shadow to obscure his danglers thank god.

"Hey Quinn," Jepha says unnecessarily, his voice as soft as cotton balls and as blurry in Quinn's ears. "You're lying in piss now, dude."

"Fuck you," Quinn mumbles, his stomach rolling over and over like a bad bad funfair ride. He is going to puke. He is going to puke and he can't make himself get up. He is going to puke on his fucking self.

Quinn begins to retch, shivering so each heave is a vibrato, and Jepha slips warm hands into his armpits to haul him up, lifting him up until he's sprawled over the toilet bowl. Jepha has nurse's hands.

Jepha knows his shit. He doesn't rub Quinn's back or ask if he's okay, just holds his head up so he can puke; Quinn's stomach fucking hurts. His eyes hurt. His head is too small and his skin is too small, and he thinks irrationally of lizards as he heaves and heaves up bright yellow bitter stomach bile.

He feels like he's puking forever, fighting for each mouthful of disgusting neon fluid that he tears up, and shivering like a fucking vibrator between each retch. He's cold with sweat and his lips sting as the freakish saliva scrapes over them. He is cold, too cold, and hot, too hot, and cold. When he finally falls back into the shower tray Jepha has turned the water on again and the room stinks of vomit more than urine.

"You done?" Jepha asks, cotton-ball soft, squatting again. This time Quinn can see his balls, but he no longer cares. He's so fucking sick. All he wants is to sleep, sleep 'til the end of the world and the end of time and the end of the aching. Oh god he wants to sleep.

He shivers a shrug, water lapping at his shoulders, warm mist hitting his ribs.

Jepha says, "I turned the water on. Put your head on the side of the tray, that way you won't choke." He's seen too many junkies, Quinn knows, too many drunks, too many wasters waste their lives too soon swallowing vomit, unconscious then dead, never knowing when they made the transition. Quinn's seen one or two himself, but he's not Jepha. He never turns them over. "_Quinn_."

"I fucking _heard_," Quinn rasps, shivering again. He slams his head into the rim of the shower tray twice before his cheek balances on cool wet plastic. He's so tired. So fucking tired.

* * *

When Quinn wakes the bathroom door's ajar and everything is different.

The water around him is shallower and the shower's shut off. His throat stings but the screaming pains are gone and he's merely cool and wet, not hot-cold-hot. His skin is the right size even if it smells like pee and stings where things have got in his cuts. And the light from the doorway is the eerie, unworldly blue-grey of the very early morning, of dawn in Atlanta.

He struggles up with a splash – his legs are weak, lack of food, lack of proper sleep, but they _work_ \- and stumbles out into the bedroom, his mind piecing together a jigsaw of blood-spattered worst-case scenarios. What might have happened while he's out of it. What might have happened.

There's just dawn light and sleepy breathing. On the king-sized bed there's a dark mass with feet and faces pouring from it, on top of the covers – Dan's sprawled like a corpse, his legs locked around Jepha's, a pillow over his face and one arm dangling off the edge. He always sleeps in these insane uncomfortable starfish shapes and claims to like it. Jepha uses his own elbow as a pillow instead of the real ones, and slips a foot between Dan's ankles like they're cables and cable ties, ivy and tree. Dan in boxers, Jepha a t-shirt, Bert in a towelling robe he's stolen from the motel – stretched across the bottom of the bed like a human draft-excluder. No blankets, no sheets, just the slow low whine of aircon and the savage unreality of dawn light filtering through adjacent buildings.

Quinn crosses the floor in steadier steps and calculates the likelihood that all three of them needed to piss in the night. That all three needed to get up and walk into the bathroom where he just happened to be sweating and clenching his way through their same fever. It's a small fucking likelihood.

Bert is not asleep. Dark, deep eyes regard Quinn with wakeful intensity, his foot jiggling gently in the air. "Hey, fuckass," he says, too quiet to wake anyone. "You smell of piss."

"Your mom smells of piss," Quinn says automatically, folding onto the floor, his head level with Bert's waist and his chin on the mattress.

"I pissed on your mom and she loved it," Bert agrees, shuffling round until his forehead touches Quinn's. His eyes are every shadow the world has ever generated, black holes in a face sucking Quinn down. His grubby, scabby fingers worm through Quinn's prematurely thin hair, through his sweaty, pissy hair.

"Asshole," Quinn sighs.

"Fuckass," Bert murmurs, and when he kisses Quinn's bile-smeared sickly mouth Quinn doesn't pull back. He shuts his eyes and breathes through his nose, the rough carpet like needles on his bare calves, and the dawn touches his eyelids like fire, waking him to the core.

* * *

  
1\. My ex-boyfriend actually did this, only it was an oil refinery he worked at.


End file.
